Back in January, we informed you about a mod for Quake 2 that added real-time ray tracing effects. Created by former NVIDIA intern Christoph Schied, a Ph.D. student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, Q2VKPT was the first playable game that is entirely raytraced and efficiently simulates fully dynamic lighting in real-time. And today, NVIDIA has announced a new version that will be based on it.
According to the green team, Quake 2 RTX will feature real-time, controllable time of day lighting, with accurate sunlight and indirect illumination, refraction on water and glass, emissive, reflective and transparent surfaces, normal and roughness maps for added surface detail, particle and laser effects for weapons, procedural environment maps featuring mountains, sky and clouds, which are updated when the time of day is changed and a flare gun for illuminating dark corners where enemies lurk.
Quake II RTX will also feature an improved denoiser, SLI support, Quake 2 XP high-detail weapons, models and textures, optional NVIDIA Flow fire, smoke and particle effects, and much more.
In short, Quake 2 RTX promises to be one of the most impressive graphical overhauls. This is what a proper modern-day remaster of id Software’s classic shooter should be and, since it will be based on the free Q2VKPT mod, Quake 2 RTX will – most likely – be available for free to everyone.
In order to showcase some of these visual improvements, NVIDIA released the following screenshots.
Enjoy!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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Quake 2 RTX looks insane! Really impressive what they can do with the OG game + new render technique and some added FX etc.
Same, I pray to the Gaming Gods it will run well on my 1080 Ti, fingers crossed hey. I am also waiting for the 3000s specifically the 3080 Ti.
Yeah I think you are right the RT bump in the 3000s should be massive, let’s just hope the price won’t be as well.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see non RTX cards giving a similar result at playable frame rates considering the simplistic geometry that Quake 2 had.
One of my top games of all time, have even played it within VR.
Imagine Alan Wake rtx! brrrrrrr!
Quake 2? Pfft! Say hail to the king, baby!
This looks really great.
I love the way video game graphics are going. We are faking less and less and soon (~5 years) we’ll have truly photorealistic video games
When doom rtx coming?
The amount of visual upgrades this game gets is amazing but it also pisses me off that this new game using this engine looks like its from 98.
not bad not bad
I could never get on with Quake 2 as the mouse controls always felt weird.
quake2xp
Thats great but it played far from fine for me back 97/98.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see non RTX cards giving a similar result at playable frame rates considering the simplistic geometry that Quake 2 had.
One of my top games of all time, have even played it within VR.
some video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJMim4piOVk
YEAH! My thoughts exactly…
It’s like we are coming full circle. I am now tempted to buy RTX just to play this…but have to hold back because don’t wanna support the greedy green team! Maybe the game might run at playable fps on a non-RTX card…
God I hope so “Maybe the game might run at playable fps on a non-RTX card…” or they drop a 7nm 3080 Ti that is 2x a 1080 Ti or more at $1000 CND 🙂
PII 733 & TNT 2 Ultra 32MB am I right 🙂 m/ , it’s pretty awesome, the 90s owned.
Wow P2 and TNT2, I played Q2 on P1 166Mhz MMX, 16MB RAM and Riva 128 (upgrade from Virge) …
And indeed this one is probably best RTX implementation and not only in Q2 🙂
I was in a bad car accident and used the claim money to buy that comp. If it was not for that accident I would of been stuck with my flat bed Compaq P1 100Mhz playing Diablo 1, Flashback and Redneck Rampage.
As bad as the accident was it was worth it all for that comp, Quake II looked insane with GPU acceleration!
LOL got have your priorities 🙂 , PC gamer 4L|F3 m/
When I said they should have marketed Quake 2 for raytracing due to all the buzz surrounding the mod I was joking.
Can’t believe the absolute madmen actually did it.
This, along with the release of raytracing to Pascal cards is making me seriously love Nvidia these days. <3
Hey i got a Voodoo 2 for my TNT 2 card to play Quake 2 from softworks to 3D 😀
It would be much better to see Heretic II on RTX enhanced ID Tech 2!